Monday, June 14, 2010

People send in links pretty often, and most of the time there's not much to do with them, short of repeating earlier pieces or pasting a picture I have of myself from the time I visited a church in Brazil and started weeping blood. Now and then, though, someone tweets or IMs something fascinating. Last week, a very funny Twitter poster and nice guy named Sskylark sent me a link to a website called Right Side News and their article, "George Will Sells Out [sic] to Cultural Corruption."

In the interest of citing sources, I will provide relevant links, but first let me implore you not to click either the link to the site or the article in question. (Most of the article is quoted below.) I know; you're tempted, drawn with a complex and unfamiliar yearning toward their content. They offer news from the Right Side, a pledge that unhouses your beliefs. You were wrong all this time and never even knew it. What side are you even on? The wrong side? The side that has more animal droppings in its food? The side that can't gamble well? You will not find these answers at these links. Instead, you could only destabilize the fragile world of simultaneous conservatism-and-correctness that their name has erected.

According to their media kit (do not click), 77% of their audience is aged 45-74. Feral youths hopping willy-nilly from this site will only tear their ad algorithms away from absorbent adult pants toward discounts on absorbing African beats. Worse, you might crash their servers. Accustomed as they are to 3,200-5,500 readers per day, referred readers from this site could dangerously increase their traffic by 50-100%, and conservatives are constitutionally unprepared for flooding. As for why a dead African dictator writing 10-15 times per month can compete popularly with dozens of contributors posting daily articles and op-eds, know too that popular approval and demand is the nostrum of the liberal, who needs his seething hordes to overwhelm the elite and narrow privilege of hard, sensible reality.That kind of reality is much on display. There's the article about how Hitler was gay and, thus, somehow this means something about Don't Ask, Don't Tell (do not click). There is the engrossing oh-my-God-connect-the-dots narrative about "The Obama Disaster Machine" and how the economy crashed in 2008, just as Barack Obama coincidentally(???) was running for president... and now there is coincidentally(???) an oil leak during the presidency of someone who advocates cap and trade... and notice that he's a socialist at the same time the oil leak happened and North Korea exists... so the oil leak was probably caused by a North Korean torpedo because Juche Stalinism and socialism are the same thing. (I didn't read the article, and neither should you, but I presume that both things are Hitler.)

The contributors are all easily Googleable and a rogues gallery of the pathetically mentally unwell. They're the sort of people who compel you to research them to see if the story gets funnier; then they inadvertently make you sad because you realize that they have real lives, which means that they have people in those real lives who are obliged to listen to them or mention to doctors that they could inherit brain diseases from them. Take Joan Swirsky (please click), whose website leads you to believe that she makes stylish flowered trellises for bat mitzvahs or embarrassing funerals, but who actually was once a journalist. At one point in her life, she did yeoman's work covering breast cancer, enough to be printed in the New York Times, yet now she pens birther conspiracy "articles" whose veracity would be challenged by any spiral-bound manifesto found on the table behind the "Three-Dollar Billary" fake dollar bills in an Army-Navy surplus store run by a person so paranoid he probably has a P.O. Box number for an email address.

These, then, are the kinds of heavy hitters you find at Right Side News: people who've mastered expertly maneuvering imaginary variables around the landscape of a Candyland game; people who, in their machinations, envision the Ice Cream Floats as a dire metaphor for a currency untethered to gold and the Gum Drop Mountain a hiding place for freedom's new arsenal. These are people who can hurl game pieces at each other in shrieking, impudent fits at the injustice of chance and loss and who see, in a small swatch of pressboard, the political map of the contemporary United States.

For today's purposes, we look at Cliff Kincaid, Senior Editor of Accuracy in Media, a non-profit best remembered for doing all of the in-the-trenches confabulating required to break the story about how the Clintons murdered Vince Foster. AIM keeps tabs on conservative media as well, noting how FOX News has moved to the left because Rupert Murdoch knows Hillary Clinton. Whether this is because Rupert is afraid Hillary will order her cadre of Arkansas State Troopers to murder him just like she did with Foster is anyone's guess, but the Clintons' hands in FOX's manifest leftward drift is unmistakable.

Kincaid is also president of America's Survival Institute, whose "about" page celebrates all its done to stave off the inevitable United Nations grab for one-world government and preposterous garbage like being able to try war criminals for war crimes even if their native countries don't like it. Evidently the UN's spidery grip on global liberty loosens often enough to allow ASI contributors to fill their site's front page with articles about the homo conspiracy to force the Red Cross to stock up on AIDS blood.

I'm not really sure what purpose this serves for gay people. Maybe it makes everyone go queer before they die. Whatever the true goal, the first people who have to get tainted gay blood are the troops, which is why the gays want to repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell, naturally resulting in thousands of otherwise butch Marines firing hot bullets of gayness at butch foreign soldiers before expiring of protracted, menasstisized gayness. Meanwhile, stateside, defenseless Texans — in their own homes — will fall prey to enemy combatants who throw down their guns, open their arms and run across the surface of the Atlantic like Daffy Duck to buttfuck America into Islamism. Or something.

I realize that this may be uncharitable to Cliff Kincaid. In fairness, he has also attended a 12-week course at the National Journalism Center, which counts Ann Coulter among its luminous alumni. Now, I know what critics will say: "This sounds like another example of conservatives founding 'parallel' systems of 'accreditation' without any demonstrable educational standards or rigorous examination in order to create journalistic/policy footsoldiers trained in echo-chamber thought and talking-point argumentation. Otherwise these souls would be forced to enter liberal arts colleges and cope with those institutions' inhospitable emphasis on fact over repetition and logic over repetition-but-with-namecalling." And perhaps you're right. But, if I may refute this observation, note that in its name it is very clearly a center for journalism, nationally even.

Let us now take Cliff Kincaid at his word, specifically his strangely capitalized damnation of yet another of that most virulent and deadly species of Quisling — the RINO (Republican in Name Only). Cliff challenges one to an honor duel in, "George Will Sells Out [sic] to Cultural Corruption." Take us away, Cliffy....

In the movie, "The Rainmaker," about an unscrupulous insurance company refusing to pay a legitimate claim, the young lawyer fighting for justice for his sick client turns to the high-powered and well-paid corporate lawyer across the table and asks, "I'm just wondering, do you even remember when you first sold out?" It is a commentary on how and why people abandon the cause of what is right for financial and other reasons.Conservative commentators love beginning columns with references to mediocre or forgotten movies. One suspects that mentioning any movie that earns critical acclaim or frequent Sunday afternoon airings invites unpleasant familiarity that impeaches false analogies. But rarely if ever do they undermine their own political ideology with a preface only marginally related to the purpose of their column.

Cliff Kincaid does not fear this, however; he's a different sort of man. Cliff can rhetorically shake his downcast head and end a lede by describing insurance companies' soullessly profit-seeking denial of care with the words, "People abandon the cause of what is right for financial and other reasons," without realizing that this describes the insurance companies his groups defended from regulation during the national healthcare debates. He's so busy dipping into the conservative-remembers-a-movie bag of tricks that he doesn't even recognize that he's sold out his own ideology's opinion on private health insurance in service of a slick intro to a completely unrelated topic.

I remembered that comment when I was told that conservative columnist George Will had endorsed gays in the military on Sunday's edition of the ABC show "This Week" and had smeared supporters of the Pentagon's homosexual exclusion policy as unintelligent. I couldn't believe it. But I checked the transcript. Indeed, George Will had said those curious things. Cliffy's employing the conservative hack trick of citing his source in the hopes that doing so precludes you from examining it yourself. You know: "Here's my link, so you could check if I was lying. I wouldn't just make this up with the evidence right here, right?" But people are lazy, and people who agree with your conclusions before reading the full article are doubly so. Since the evidence won't do it for him, Cliff needs the soft dismissal of Washington op-ed speak to do the labor of supporting his point.

First up we get "smear," which suggests that Will pursued a kind of malicious agenda. On the contrary, his comment, while reflecting his feelings, is pretty clearly a joke. I know; I read the transcript Cliff linked. The panelists break into laughter for a bit. Will says something a little undiplomatic; it's out of character for him. It's played for laughs. If he were out to enforce a smear, he probably wouldn't have settled for a one-line interjection before ceding the conversation again to someone else.

Second, Cliff paints Will as someone who says "curious things" — like a person who knows a lot about physics and ornithology and who lives out of a cart filled with cans of mashed yams, or a senile grandmother who peppers her conversation with startling social insights, trumpeting farts and occasional remarks about how Magyars will always cheat you. Curious is an interesting choice of words. It makes him seem dotty in a way that words like "accurate" or "factually supported" do not. Will's comment about intelligence came in response to a question about why congressional Republicans opposed the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell (hereafter, "DADT") when it was supported by a majority of Americans, as well as non-commissioned and ranking members of the military, conservatives and evangelicals. The only curious thing here isn't Will's comment but GOP congressional decision-making. But because reflection is not only generally anathema to people like Cliff but also poison to this specific point, this curiosity will go unexamined.

Although Will was referring to Republican members of Congress as dummies, it is a fact that the chiefs of all the military services also expressed their opposition to repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," at this time. Are they stupid, too?No, but here Cliff clearly hopes his audience is. He's just shifted the terms of the GOP congressional attitude, defining intolerance down to wed it to the views of a venerable and supposedly serenely apolitical group of military heads. Military chiefs are currently conducting studies to examine the implementation of gay integration, not to see whether it should be done at all. It is — at least according to the terms by which it was sold to the public — a procedural study, not a policy study. GOP congressional objection isn't a procedural issue but one of policy. While the military says, "Not now until we know how," Republicans in congress say, "No, period," perhaps adding some caveat from the Bible or a manufactured point allegedly from the same military chiefs conducting current studies.

Cliff's aim here is simple: he thinks that you, his reader, are a conservative. Further, as a conservative, you would never doubt the nobility and probity of military leaders. Since they cannot be dummies, certainly nobody who agrees with them could be either. All he has to do is misrepresent the discourse in congress and the military's reception of the mandate to integrate, and he's created an unassailably patriotic bloc with which No True Scotsman American can disagree. It's nearly flawless, apart from the fact that it relies on conditions that don't actually exist.

Sunday, May 30, will mark the day when George Will sold out.Every time these outraged drummings-out of the party occur, it's hard not to think of early-1990s Nirvana fans impotently yanking on the sleeves of strangers and trying to explain to them how everything post-Bleach will ineluctably be tarred with the blood of spiritually null consumerism. They were the keepers of the true spirit of creative endeavor. In their hermetic minority, they spoke for a majority they neither encountered nor respected. Like a political party odious to conservatives, they envisioned themselves as the vanguard of a greater truth that needed to be protected from the ignorance of people who didn't agree with it, however numerous. Nevermind the legitimacy of different content. Nevermind the mass approval for the subsequent ideas and product. Nevermind the joy that others took in a more mainstream approach. Nevermind.

There's something kind of helplessly adorable about conservatives' need to label apostate leaders as RINOs and try to expurgate their words and images from the party with the sort of Stalinist fervor one usually reserves for — well, Stalin, I guess. After Michelle Malkin's creating a McCarthyite list of Palin critics following the 2008 election, after code-worded calls for Arlen Specter's death post-defection, after the sanguinary denunciation of Joseph Cao for voting for healthcare reform and after David Frum's summary firing for suggesting that the GOP had dropped the ball on the same, it's really not too much to expect that they'll begin photoshopping images of columnists out of AP and GETTY Photo archives.

We did not support them. They never spoke for us. They were never there.

On this occasion, he decided to take a politically expedient viewpoint, which won him plaudits from the other panelists, but the policy position he took is demonstrably fraught with dangers for our troops.Cliffy uses a good and stressful word like fraught, pluralizes danger and keeps things vague. It sounds good. Troops are in danger. They're troops; it's danger; shit is bad — real bad. Of course, Cliffy has to keep it vague, because as soon as he starts to explicate the dangers involved, his statement collapses under the weight of invention and inanity. When it comes to his actual, concrete examples, Cliff Kincaid has made a statement about incipient perils about as dire as saying, "Enabling our troops to have drivers licenses is a policy position fraught with dangers. They could be injured or killed behind the wheel and everything."

In short, the only time he flirts with reality, he does so in ways that everyone writes off as meaningless, random, the simple consequences of being alive, having a job, doing a thing. Military work is dangerous; that's part of the job. The fact is so self-evident that mentioning it in the context of homosexuals signifies nothing — unless one's agenda requires a set of Rube Goldberg possibilities whereby the simple act of fulfilling the terms of employment near gay people ramps up the danger past its already absurdly terrifying levels. In Cliff Kincaid's military, flamboyant gays could have STDs and, like, an enemy bullet could go through one and into the ovaries of a good heterosexual female soldier and make her birth octdecaplets that are actually made of 50% Gay and 50% AIDS. Meanwhile, the same bullet could go through a straight soldier and into the same ovaries, and instead the woman would just start squatting out solid gold Bibles. (Apologies to Mormon readers if this accidentally co-opts a founder narrative.) All these things are possible; now let's construct a policy.

It is reckless and dangerous, primarily because Will and other panelists refused to come to grips with the health impact of gays in the military.Luckily for me and for you, Cliff Kincaid doesn't attempt to come to grips with them here either. Perhaps the grippy handholds on the sides of homo health are too fraught with dangers. All you need to know is that he's forming his rhetorical tactics from the same playbook as conservative and evangelical anti-integration elements in 1993. His playbook isn't just 17 years old, it's also 17 years wrong. (For more on this, please see the review of Nathaniel Frank's Unfriendly Fire.)

One of the boons of writing to an echo chamber audience reliant on decades of parroted misinformation based on studies that all quote each other is that Kincaid's rhetorical shorthand can atrophy until it disappears into "dog whistle" status. The discourse just sort of collapses inward into a black hole of thought, something that can only be detected by how much a universe of objective somethings reacts to a null area of great sucking nothing. The absence of evidence concentrates into a powerful well only seen via the evidence of absence.

It's a sweet set up. All Cliff has to do is hammer at the familiar demonizing image of homosexuals as members of a culture of terminally fabulous cowards built from the ground up with clothes and HIV, mention a "danger" to "the troops," mention the risks of "gay blood," and instantly the conservative audience is transported back to the deranged fantasies of 1993, of Gay Bowel Syndrome* and sodomites so promiscuous that AIDS-infected blood torrents out of their permanently dilated anuses.

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* — Idi Amin, a contributor to Et tu, Mr. Destructo? who unfortunately has yet to publish several works-in-progress and who is an excellent researcher, pointed out that Gay Bowel Syndrome used to be the #1 most viewed page on Conservapedia, until the "encyclopedia's" owner deleted the page-total data and reset all the pageviews. Readers are welcome to suggest any way in which that entry's being the most popular could reflect well on the site or on conservatives in general. Just by back-of-the-napkin figuring, it either garnered tremendous attention from GLBT and liberal internet users sending each other the link in order to laugh at something both cruelly and fatuously stupid, or the millions of closeted-somewhere-in-Narnia conservatives in America were reading up on the condition in mortal fear that they'd be awakened some morning by panicked wives asking why blood was pouring out of their asses and if the stain pattern looked at all to them like The Christ.

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Not explicitly writing out these assertions means that Cliff Kincaid runs less risk of having his words and precious void of facts challenged while also engaging in a kind of conspiratorial nod of understanding with the audience. "See," he winks, "we know better. We understand the stakes." Conservative writers don't rely on readers' inference as much as they do just because they lack data or the privilege of history that actually occurred; they do it because it creates a rewarding sense of bonding between the audience and their writer. Someone's writing speaks just to them, the self-enlightened and precious few who know how to decode the real and unassailable truth from a world of liberal simulacra.

Socializing with gays is not the main issueHere Kincaid just isn't reading his party's mainstream literature on the issue. (Full credit to him; at least he consistently fails to do almost any reading.) As pointed out in the Unfriendly Fire review, the politically non-explosive rationale the GOP hit upon for discriminating against homosexuals in the military was "unit cohesion," defined not by task-oriented cohesion but by social factors. In short, a unit coheres not because it works well together but because the members in it like each other when they don't have things to do, potentially under fire. There is no way to define the GOP's main approach to the integration issue as anything other than, "Socializing with gays is the main issue."

although it can be a problem in the close quarters and battlefield conditions that our soldiers are forced to endure.Stop for a moment and applaud Cliff Kincaid. Whenever situations might arise between homosexual soldiers and those who loathe them or are afraid of them, he has looked deeply at the kind of discomfort or unhappiness that can occur in close quarters and empathized with those who have to be around the queers. People with antipathy for other groups of people should be preserved from having to be near those people, in the interests of personal liberty and safety. Someone who fears gays has a right to have gays prevented from encountering him.

For the record, like almost everything else dealing with gay integration of the military — including, humorously, some of the sexual paranoia — you can swap "negro" for "gay" and an N-bomb for "faggot" and virtually recreate verbatim arguments against the racial integration of the American military. The thing about hatred and discrimination is that it just repurposes its rage against new groups whenever an old one falls away or becomes politically deadly; it hardly ever makes any attempt at novelty when justifying itself.

The key problem is that the blood of male homosexuals is contaminated with HIV and other diseases that can cause death.Aw, nuts. Here Cliffy screwed up and crossed the line from dog whistles to explicit bullshit. As he formulates it, "The blood of male homosexuals is contaminated with HIV and other diseases that can cause death." It's not that it can be; it's not that a higher percentage of homosexual men have HIV or STDs than heterosexual men; it just is. Gay men have HIV and STDs. All of them. Because they are gay. The two conditions are indivisible. Also, these conditions, both being gay and having HIV or other STDs does not happen to heterosexuals, which is why we allow them in the military. If it could ever be proved theoretically possible that heterosexuals could get either STDs or The Gay, then surely our stringent standards would preclude their inclusion in the military as well. Does that scenario seem a little thorny? A little? Cool.

These infectious agents cannot be effectively screened out of the blood supply. That is why gay males are prohibited from donating blood.No, demonizing straw men versions of gay people and "the gay lifestyle" (as if there is only one) are why gay males are prohibited from donating blood. People like Cliff Kincaid who trade in nightmarish pictures of gay people are why gay males are prohibited from donating blood. Because, of course, all the infectious agents he names and the difficulty in screening them applies equally to anyone of any sexual orientation who ever has sex, shares a bad needle or gets a bad blood transfusion.

At one's most generous, one could suggest that Cliff's working off his 1993 rhetoric either out of research laziness or argumentative laziness. In 1993 at least, it still took months of infection before HIV was detectable via blood test. Today, it takes just a few weeks. However, the difficulty for screening for it is no greater or lesser depending on a person's sex or orientation. Moreover, by criminalizing homosexuality in the military — or at least criminalizing all behavior or conversation that would indicate it, which comes to the same thing — military leaders create a culture that incentivizes deceit.

Part of effectively screening blood relies on getting helpful information from patient histories. But any soldier — gay, bi or straight — who engages in homosexual acts has career-defining reasons to lie about them, thus increasing potential risks. In short, if Cliff Kincaid wants to make the health of troops and the safety of blood transfusions the binding determinant for his opinion on gays in the military, then he has no excuse for not favoring total and unequivocal integration and decriminalization.

But, of course, Cliff Kincaid isn't talking about facts. His is a world where being male and having HIV/STDs is proof of homosexuality, and homosexuality is proof of having HIV/STDs. Each condition presupposes the other, as two faces on the same figure, like Janus. (The name even sounds like a diseased butt if you pronounce it right.) If Cliff were really concerned with behaviors and conditions that lead to higher STD and health risks, he'd have to grapple uncomfortably with reality, like economic factors. After all, poverty and STD infection rates correlate, just as homosexuality and infection do. But discussing anything as real and germane to the health issue as that would uncomfortably raise questions about why the military nevertheless aggressively recruits low-income individuals, and why Cliff himself doesn't favor massive social welfare programs for low-income areas to stave off a nationwide pandemic.

What George Will may not understand is that the gays are already moving beyond the issue of acceptance in the military to demanding that the federal government lift the ban on gay blood, putting all of our lives at risk and in jeopardy. Remember how you can take any current anti-gay argument regarding the military, swap the word "gay" with "negro" and recreate arguments against racial integration? African-Americans should remember this slippery-slope argument as both a defense of the segregated military and Jim Crow. Like the negro, if you give a gay an inch, he'll just take a mile. You can be nice to him, even generous, just give him this one thing, and I guaran-damn-tee you he'll just want more. You can't even reason with a gay. Too stubborn.

Sure, sure, I see what you're saying. Y'all let him die for his country now, he might start wanting to help keep someone else from dying, by givin' blood. Thing you ain't figured is, the gay, like the negro, hates Americans — good folk, like you and me. The gay will deliberately infect y'all to kill y'all, because that's how gay people reproduce, by puttin' y'all in the ground and waiting for y'all to hatch gay eggs. Killin' y'all's easy for him to do, because, like all gay people, his gayness already gave him the GRIDS, which is just what we used to call HIV, before Shitlery Rod-Like-a-Man Cunton made us all start talkin politically correct, just like the Nazi party. Anyway, Jesus forgives.

But somewhere along the way, possibly in response to criticism of columns like that, Will decided to give up the fight. Perhaps he started moving this way after the election when he hosted a dinner party for then-President elect Obama. In any case, the drift reached a ridiculous extreme on Sunday's "This Week" program, when asked why Republicans in Congress were fighting repeal of the homosexual exclusion policy, and Will replied with the comment, "They're not being very intelligent." The other panelists chuckled.Here it is, 531 words into his column, Cliff Kincaid has finally found most of a lede graf. Note, also, that this is the first time he has actually quoted what Will said, after describing it as a smear, then freighting the column with the apocalyptic horrors of the coming queerscape. Under normal circumstances, this might seem like poor journalism. Remember that Cliff attended the National Journalism Center, twelve weeks of severe samurai training that produced this kind of cutting analysis. If it seems as if Cliff is going about the game backwards, chances are he's playing a game you can't even understand.

This is what George Will has become-a purveyor of insults against those who used to treat his columns as authoritative. He apparently has discovered that it plays well to the liberal intelligentsia and saves him a lot of hate mail. He has found his new "base," just like other conservatives who sell out. Now, he will be praised at the dinner parties with the "progressives" from the Obama Administration.Ah, the dinner parties with the "progressives" from the Obama administration. Normally the use of the definite article would come off as lazy or perhaps poor editing. But that's if you're using regular journalism, local journalism, decentralized journalism. Cliff Kincaid's trained his nose to sniff out a cabal. He's devoted his career to exposing the global plans of the United Nations, the ones they don't publish in their thousands of papers of public policy. The fact that George Will hates progressives and Democrats and that progressives and Democrats hate George Will is in fact the first piece of evidence that the opposite must be true.

Whatever the motivation, I remember being struck when I listened to George Will's speech at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and thought about how it was narrowly focused on economics and had ignored the moral and social dimensions of the crisis that affects our nation.Whatever Cliff was struck by, I hope it was as leaden as his prose.

I know that George Will is aware of the moral crisis, especially how it is reflected in the acceptance of the hideous practice of abortion on demand in the United States. Will has a child with Down syndrome and he has written about how society is targeting a whole class of citizens with this disability for elimination. With good reason, he finds it morally objectionable.... Will George Will now abandon this issue as well?You are now entering scoop country. George Will has sold out to cultural corruption, because he has failed to take the moral crisis in this country seriously. See, the problem with repealing DADT is the abortions, because of people with Down syndrome, and also their genocide. You are through the looking glass.

Now, because all quotes from Cliff Kincaid are presented here in bold, it's impossible to tell otherwise that he bolds the whole following section, except the words, "Prenatal Disability Profiling" for no reason, then posts two large graphs without blockquoting them (which has been done here):

Fortunately, there are parents like Kurt Kondrich of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who keep this issue alive. You may remember that Kurt and his wife Margie and their Down syndrome daughter, Chloe, met with Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign. The meeting received national attention.

Kurt has written a short piece with a new twist on the "profiling" controversy involving the new Arizona immigration law. He writes about the issue of "Prenatal Disability Profiling" and says:

"Since passage of the new Arizona immigration law to curb the flow of illegal aliens into this country there has been a lot of talk about 'profiling.' Profiling can be defined as targeting an individual for criminal activity based upon race, ethnicity, religion or national origin. Many people across this nation decry this procedure as outrageous and unacceptable. There is a targeted group of unborn children who are profiled and targeted daily, and none of them have engaged in any type of criminal activity. Their only crime is they do not meet the standards of perfection and beauty a lost culture has deemed necessary to enter this world. The extra chromosome they carry is being genetically profiled, and their unique, angelic traits do not allow the majority of them to secure 'entry' into this world.

"When a person is profiled and identified as an illegal alien the most severe penalty can be deportation. When a child is prenatally profiled and identified as having Down syndrome the penalty in 90% plus of the cases is termination. In all my years as a Police Officer I cannot recall a criminal case involving an individual with Down syndrome, and I often think how better off our society would be if these terminated 'profiled' individuals had been granted citizenship. It is frightening how silent the outcry is for this form of profiling, and my prayer is that this nation and world will wake up soon and recognize the true injustice of 'Prenatal Disability Profiling.'"

This introduction and pair of grafs does a lot of light lifting, but it's engrossing just because it's so bad. Forget that Cliff and this Kurt guy ignore that conservatives and christians abort disabled fetuses too, and that the sort of people who oppose abortion are the least likely to admit having one, especially for a reason that could be perceived as one of convenience or vanity. Forget their blithe unconcern with the perils of immigrant life. Forget that deportation could mean returning to a dangerous country. Forget protracted suffering, illness, starvation, want. None of that is important. We can talk about little pink Trig Palins.

People with Down syndrome don't commit crimes. A cop said so. People with Down's are often also kept at home, escorted by handlers or taken care of by social workers, too, so maybe there's less opportunity for mischief. I'm sure people without Down's who are monitored just as closely and taken care of by a social safety net might commit far fewer crimes too, but Cliff and this Kurt guy would probably start bleating about liberty or bootstraps. Whatever.

The point is that illegals commit crimes by being illegal, because they immigrated after all the good kinds of light and protestant foreigners immigrated without papers and threw padlocks on the borders after they crossed over. Kurt and Cliff seem to think the solution is to have more Down's kids and racially profile and deport illegals, because these two issues are the same, and there's a real equivalency here. They seem mistaken. A more sensible and equitable solution is to make a Down Syndrome Congress and have all the current people with Down's make other people having Down's illegal. Any future Down's births will be shoved back into the uterus by Minutemen.

Now we're back to Cliff himself:

The reason the unborn are targeted for elimination is that they are not considered members of the protected groups of people under the Marxist view.How can you tell Cliff hasn't read Karl Marx? Because he wrote that sentence. How can you tell that he has no rational apprehension of any policy of Barack Obama's? Because he thinks any of them have anything to do with Karl Marx.

Their status is of secondary importance to the rights of women, one of the protected groups. On the other hand, illegal aliens and gays are considered victims of American society and have been elevated to protected status. As such, the view is that they should and must be given special rights.As with gays and STDs, the veil slips again. Conservatives talk about liberty and individual rights, but like a lot of good conservatives, Cliffy believes in civil rights for some people and not others. You can tell that he denies any universality of civil rights, because he literally cannot grasp that concept without thinking of them as "special" when they happen to the wrong sort of people — women, homos, coloreds who drive early model pickups and carpool to gardening gigs.

George Will is just the latest example of a trend by some "conservatives" to surrender on the cultural issues and fight the battle on economic grounds. Another example is his fellow "conservative" columnist, Kathleen Parker, also of the Washington Post writers group. She has become pro-gay as well.Cliff Kincaid has written 1,149 words. He is 148 away from his conclusion. He is not satisfied merely to spend 50% of his column on George Will and homosexual integration in the military, then move on to abortion, Down's and illegal immigration in the next 600. He then adds a completely unrelated writer, without links or citation, without any indication of what he's talking about, then ignores her immediately. Cliff has veered off the Candyland board into a boundless chasm. Kathleen Parker cannot hear the Parker Brothers. Things fall apart. The National Journalism Center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. It is negative liberty, and at last you are free.

When translated into political terms, this becomes the kind of "new" or "progressive" conservatism that we saw in the British Conservative Party, which failed to win a majority of the vote in the recent British elections and now has to exercise power in collaboration with a far-left party. We have called them the fake conservatives.Holy shit. Right Side News has, like, called it and everything.

British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader David Cameron is so much of a panderer to the militant homosexuals in Britain that he told them he wants to rid "homophobia" from the schools, give special funding to the transgendered, and provide tax breaks for homosexual couples.Tax breaks for any kinds of couples? Not in America, buddy!

It is tragic to see a pillar of the conservative media become a captive of the lost culture. The American conservative movement has lost one of its greatest columnists.I prefer to think of this phrasing as Cliffy grandiosely patting himself on the back, then admitting that he finds George Will's reasoning impenetrable and confusing. This would be a strong statement from the kind of national and central journalism unafraid to tackle the gay problem in the United States military through the lens of the abortion genocide of the Down's kids who never commit crimes, like the Arizona immigration law — which is good — although constantly broken by the immigrants.

Immigrants. Even when I thought it was gay "bears," I knew it was them.

So am I now required to not hold George Will in contempt? Because I am NOT down with that.

This Cliffy feller is a real piece of work innee? Insane? Stupid? Just an incredibly asshole? A little of each? Is there even a difference? Good lord.

I particularly how we countenance abortion because of "the Marxist view." WT Fuck does Marxism have to do with anything here? Nothing, of course--as I always say, wingnuts take scary-sounding buzzwords and drain them of all meaning except a generic "BAD." This would seem to be the logical endpoint of that process.

I think the "Cliffy kinda looks like a pedophile" photo caption was a bad choice. If you ever call attention to yourself, somebody might dig that up and tell you that you are made out of crass ad hominem attacks, ironically ad hominem-ing you at the same time.

The 'Marxist view' referred to is 'Cultural Marxism'. Self-declared Marxists in the West today focus on feminism, abortion, gay rights, and anti-racism rather than the class struggle.

These opinions and social policies that those who call themselves Marxists favour today may not have all that much to do with Karl's writings (or working class values), but that's not really Cliff Kincaid's fault.

To anyone interested in this change in the Left, or anyone interested in Europe's political history or future, I would recommend Paul Gottfried's book 'The strange death of Marxism: the European left in the new millennium'.

"And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger?" Plato's Symposium,

Self-declared Marxists in the West today focus on feminism, abortion, gay rights, and anti-racism rather than the class struggle.

And lots of perfectly content capitalists care about these things too. Characterizing them as "Marxist" is perfectly meaningless. If you're trying to claim that Cliffy actually knows what he's talking about or is making any sort of coherent point here...I can only point and laugh.

Et tu, Mr. Destructo? is a politics, sports and media blog whose purpose is to tell jokes or be really right about things. All of us have real jobs and don't need the hassle that telling jokes here might occasion, which is why some contributors find it more tasteful to pretend to be dead mass murderers.